Wars cause breakdowns of economies by destroying production, trade and infrastructures. They disrupt sowing and harvesting as well as distribution chains of all kinds. During World War II the consequences thereof for people living in occupied countries were aggravated by ruthlessly implemented German exploitation policies. The resulting shortage took different forms, but was an issue from France to Russia and from Norway to Greece. To varying degrees, it concerned food, housing, heating and electricity as well as products related to medical care––to name just the most essential issues.
Research has so far focussed more on policies of exploitation than on coping strategies. Put more precisely, this history of exploitation has predominantly been written about in one of three strands. First, the focus has either been on economic macro-history with an interest in assessing the contributions of various countries regarding the German war effort, among them the highly industrialised countries of Western Europe like France, without which Germany could not have continued the war for six long years. 1 Second, the approach has been perpetrator centred, paying close attention to those who enacted starvation policies. 2 As a result, we know how different German institutions organised exploitation and that hunger policies were deeply rooted in anti-Semitism and racism, resulting in mass starvation in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, especially in the cities. 3 A third strand of research focusses on the exploitation of forced labour, paying special attention to the management of forced labour by German authorities, on living and working conditions in the Reich (much less in occupied territories) and especially on Jewish slave labour. 4
In contrast to this, we know far less about how people handled shortage and scarcity or how they tried to survive in times when starvation hit whole societies. The question ‘Being hungry – what do people do?’ 5 should therefore not be limited to subsistence economies of pre-modern and early modern times, but should be asked concerning everyday life under occupation during World War II as well. In these years, though shortages took different forms and concerned different commodities, scarcity made itself quickly felt in occupied Europe. It hit occupied Soviet cities, where the situation had already become one of utmost destitution and desperation by late summer and autumn of 1941. However, mortality rates were very high in Greece as well. Wherever hunger raged the effect was felt directly, but hunger played its part indirectly as well, because malnutrition and dire living conditions such as a lack of heating material, catastrophic sanitary conditions and insufficient medical care increased people’s exposure to tuberculosis, influenza and other illnesses. 6 Compared to this, most countries in Western Europe were better off. Nevertheless, the gnawing sensation of hunger and general scarcity was foremost on many people’s minds.
To discuss these issues in more detail and act as an introduction to this book, this chapter therefore starts with an overview on National Socialist exploitation policies. It then turns to economies of shortage in occupied societies. Special attention will be paid to rationing systems and makeshift economies as well as on how German occupying personnel criminalised the survival strategies of local populations. By addressing the interaction between ‘the occupiers’ and ‘the occupied’––though of course bearing in mind that both groups were far from homogenous––in supply situations, this chapter further aims at contributing to the growing body of literature on how occupation moulded social order all over occupied Europe.
Exploitation Policies
Leading National Socialists regarded it a lesson learnt from World War I that the lost ‘battle for food’ (Kampf um die Ernährung) led to the breakdown of the German home front and, as a consequence, to defeat. Believing that Germany was overpopulated and endangered by being cut off from imports by blockades, they regarded the policy of Lebensraum as essential for space as well as food. Medical experts backed such assumptions. As early as 1921 they warned that childhood malnutrition due to the blockade during World War I led to ‘an intensive racial worsening of the growing generation’. 7 Therefore, Hitler himself advised Wehrmacht officers in February of 1939 that ‘the food question [is] … the most vital problem … that demands being solved by expansion’. 8
The man in charge of dealing with this was Herbert Backe. He was made State Secretary (Staatssekretär) to Richard Walther Darré when Darré took office as Minister of Agriculture and became Head of the Food Commission in the Four-Year-Plan administration later on. 9 Backe was among those top officials who––only a few days after Hitler had met with the military leadership on 4 November 1940––were informed by Göring of the decision to invade the Soviet Union. It became his task to set up plans that would enable the German Wehrmacht to lead this war as a Blitzkrieg. This was only deemed possible if supplies were not to be brought in from Germany, where the population was to be spared hardships, but by feeding the troops from Soviet soil and requisitioning ‘surpluses’ for the home front. In this context, recent research stresses a certain interconnectedness between the envisaged ‘elimination of all [Soviet] political leaders’, especially the ‘Bolshevik–Jewish intelligentsia’ and nutrition policies. 10 The breakdown of the Soviet state was considered a prerequisite to ruthlessly requisitioning foodstuffs. Even before the German assault on the Soviet Union, military as well as civil personnel were well aware that this meant that ‘many millions’, some sources speak explicitly of ‘30 million’ were going to be starved. 11
Set-up plans dividing the Soviet Union into so-called deficit zones––like the forest regions of Belarus and northern as well as central Russia––and zones in Ukraine, southern Russia and the Caucasus which were believed to produce surpluses 12 proved as early as July 1941 to be impossible to realise, since robbing the local population of its supply and securing the hinterland could not be put into practice at the same time. As a consequence, more selective hunger policies were implemented, which differentiated between smaller sub-regions and various groups of local populations. The non-Jewish population in the former Baltic countries, in Western Ukraine and the Caucasus as well as those working for the German war effort were to be fed at least to some degree. It is worth noting that the acceleration and radicalisation of German anti-Semitic measures fit precisely within this context of extreme supply problems: German decision makers selected the Jewish population as ‘useless eaters’ and tried to reduce supply problems by murdering them. The same was true regarding Soviet prisoners of war who were already under German control. Though numbers are difficult to obtain, educated guesses speak of four million victims resulting from German starvation policies on S...